


In the Belly of the Beast

by BlackjackKent



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-25
Updated: 2018-02-25
Packaged: 2019-03-23 23:09:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13798287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackjackKent/pseuds/BlackjackKent
Summary: Zaeed reflects on his feelings for Dr. Chakwas while coming all too closer to losing her.





	In the Belly of the Beast

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IllusiveSoul](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IllusiveSoul/gifts).



> This is my fill for SpecReqs 2018 for IllusiveSoul, who requested "Zaeed trying to be all romantic and nice when being with Dr. Chakwas."
> 
> ...Emphasis on "trying," in this case. ;)
> 
> This wasn't actually one of the pairs I initially offered but I loved the idea so much I had to give it a shot! Hope you like it! :D

Zaeed Massani was used to places that smelled bad. 

He’d been a merc most of his life, after all. The Blue Suns worked out of Omega primarily, a place that smelled constantly of red sand and blood, and when he’d turned freelancer he’d pulled jobs from even dingier corners of the galaxy, places even the varren avoided.

But he’d never been anywhere that smelled like the Collector base. The air was dank, damp; it stank of rot and decay. Every step was met with an unpleasant squishing sound that might have been mud but, given the piles of bodies they’d seen when they entered, probably wasn’t. It was like being in the gut of some massive beast bloated from its latest meal.

“Almost envy the goddamn robot,” Zaeed muttered to Solus, peering up through the dimness to the muted outline of Legion moving through the vents above them. “Least he isn’t stepping in all this shite.”

“Geth infrastructure not susceptible to moisture,” Solus said casually. “Olfactory stimulus also not a concern.”

“Well, maybe he should be down here and me in the vent then,” Zaeed growled.

“Unlikely. Geth reflexes and adaptability to unfamiliar technological systems far superior to human—“

_ WHINGGG. _ A thermal bolt splashed past them, ricocheting off one of the metallic barriers stretched across the hallway as yet another wave of Collectors bore down on their fireteam. Zaeed cursed, dropped to his knees and raised his rifle.

“My point is,” he snapped, “this place is goddamn awful.”

“…Cannot offer a counterargument in that respect.”

*****

It had only been a few hours since they crash-landed on the hull of the base, but it felt as if they had been fighting at Shepard’s side through that corridor for years. By the time Legion managed to hack the last of the doors and let the two fireteams into the central chamber of the area, Zaeed was gasping for breath. They were all winded, bruised and battered but not broken.

But the doors shut behind them and held steady. A welcome silence fell.  “Sound off,” Shepard snapped briskly. One by one, they all identified themselves between harsh exhalations. All present and accounted for. The suicide mission hadn’t claimed its victims just yet.

Then-- “Shepard.” The room’s ceiling was high, almost out of sight, and Lawson’s voice echoed a little as she called to their commander. “You need to see this.”

Shepard had sagged against the wall wearily, and it took her a moment to look up, then another to heave herself back to a standing position and move to see what the Cerberus operative had found. Zaeed had been busily considering which bit of the floor might be the least disgusting to sit down on, but when Shepard moved, he glanced at Solus and both of them wordlessly fell into step behind her. Judging by Lawson’s tone, there wasn’t cheery news waiting ahead.

The far end of the enormous chamber was lined with tubing. Zaeed was reminded, with a visceral pang, of a job long ago which had sent him crawling through Omega’s plumbing system.  _ Pipes everywhere, and the smell of shit so strong you might as well have been up someone’s ass. _ But there was no mistaking this for Omega. It was inescapably alien, overwhelmingly unsettling; even Zaeed, who had seen everything the galaxy had to offer and not flinched from it, felt shivers up and down his back.

Lawson gestured; he followed the way she was pointing with his eyes, swore under his breath. Shepard scowled, rapped out a quick loud burst of profanity.

The far wall was lined with a series of…well, there was no other word for it. Coffins.

Alien coffins, monstrous structures of the same twisting, sinuous half-flesh that made up the whole ship. The fronts were covered with some dirty sort of plateglass that revealed, through a translucent blur, a human form curled within each one.

As they drew closer to the nearest one, that form took on detail. It was a woman wearing a dirty Alliance colony standard-issue coverall. Her eyes were closed, her head slumped on her shoulder. Her chest rose and fell in in unsteady, hiccupping breaths.

“Oh, my God…” Shepard whispered. “She’s still alive.”

As if hearing the words, the woman stirred, her eyes opening. Even before she was fully conscious, her eyes were visibly dilated with terror. Her hands reached out, pressed against the glass, clawing for escape. Shepard touched the glass in answer, a gesture of comfort, of the intent to rescue her-- but it was too late.

Abruptly, the woman began to scream. Despite the look on her face, it was not a cry of fear, but piercing, bone-chilling, the sound of unbearable pain. They watched, horrified, as blood spattered the inside of the coffin. The floor of the fleshy cage had opened, revealing whirling blades moving almost too fast to see; the woman sank out of sight, was consumed by the beast around them almost before they had time to process what was happening. 

And then she was gone. All that was left was the blood.

“Goddamn fucking hell. They’re death traps,” Zaeed muttered hoarsely. His eyes slid down the wall, finding face after face behind that translucent glass—and with a sickening thud, his heart dropped into his stomach. Some of them were familiar.

“The crew,” he growled. “They’re over here. More over here!”

And then he was moving. He didn’t wait for the others to catch up, didn’t look to be sure they spread out and got the rest of the crew safely out of their caskets. He knew they’d do their jobs…but if he was honest, that first face he’d recognized was the one he’d feared for ever since the crew was taken. He had to get her out.

The butt of his rifle smashed against the glass keeping him from Karin.

****

_ He’d thought she was beautiful the first moment he saw her, actually. She’d insisted on checking on his eye -- or what was left of it, anyway.  _

_ “Don’t need a goddamn doctor,” he told her. “Been this way for years.” _

_ “All the more reason to be sure nothing’s wrong,” she said. “Report to the medbay at 1300.” And then she’d left the hold, and there had been such casual certainty in her voice, such confidence that she knew best and would be obeyed, that he’d found himself standing in her medbay at the appointed hour almost without realizing he had walked there. _

_ And he’d found himself talking, too. She asked questions-- about Vido, about the bullet that had taken half his sight-- not in the rough, wary way that Shepard did, but with legitimate interest, with kindness. She was warm. _

_ “He was my goddamn friend,” he told her, in a quieter voice than he’d used to speak to anyone in years. “But the Suns meant more to him than that.” _

_ “There are things that hurt more than bullets,” was all she said, with a quiet nod. _

_ She meant betrayal, of course, but at some point he began to learn about a new sort of pain, the kind that he had never experienced before. Not the pain of blood and scars, but a longing, a loss of something he’d never had. These conversations were simply normal to her, a part of her work. But it was the first warm concern anyone had ever expressed for him, possibly in his entire life. He left the medbay feeling as if he’d stepped briefly into some alternate universe and left part of himself there. _

_ He found himself looking forward to the follow-up visit she’d requested. And then a week or so later, a thermal bolt from a Blood Pack merc had shattered the medigel unit on his armor and he’d nearly bled out from a scratch wound across his shoulder, and he’d spent the following five days flat on his back under her care, and he was utterly lost. _

_ She was soft, kind. She didn’t move like a soldier, but always with an implacable purpose. Were he to pull a gun on her, he had no doubt she could defend herself, and yet she put everyone around her at ease. He didn’t understand it, and it made him horribly uncomfortable, that feeling of being without the wary tension that he wore like armor. But it also fascinated him and drew him, and even after his shoulder had healed, he found himself looking for minor excuses to visit her. _

_ Several times he invented a pretense of a lingering injury here or there-- not an unlikely story, given the state of his scarred body. Sometimes he simply talked about their current mission, about the impending trip through the Omega-4 relay. Sometimes he even asked questions, something he had not made a point of doing since he was seven, and listened to the answers as she told them of her “family,” her bond to the Alliance, to the Normandy, to Shepard. _

_ A few days later Shepard mentioned in passing that she meant to buy the doctor a bottle of brandy and that was when Zaeed really learned about this new kind of pain he didn’t understand. Of course, Shepard had known Karin a lot longer than Zaeed had, and yet the jealousy was sharp and pointed and stuck him all over. And he had a long history of not putting up with enemy attacks -- even from within his own mind. _

****

_ “That’s...very kind of you to offer, Zaeed.” Karin looked rather surprised, tilting her head and watching the merc shift awkwardly from foot to foot. _

_ He nodded firmly, crossing his arms and examining a spot somewhere past her shoulder. “You can have a full crate of them waiting for you any time you like. One bottle doesn’t last very goddamn long, y’know.” _

_ Karin’s lips twitched. “Well, it depends who you ask,” she said mildly. “Nevertheless...I appreciate the thoughtfulness.” _

_ He looked pleased, his scarred face twisting in a slight smile. “Hoped you would,” he grunted.  _

Goddamn. I sound like a bloody varren. _ How did Krios do it? That soft, placid, gentle baritone had Shepard falling all over him; Thane was a gentleman in spite of his profession. Zaeed was not a gentleman...and until he met Karin, he hadn’t wanted to be. _

_ “Anyway, yeah...just tell me when you need a case and I’ll see to it.” He nodded a few times firmly. _

_ “Where do you purchase it, if I might ask?” she said curiously. “I only asked Shepard because no one seems to sell it anymore.” _

_ He cleared his throat. “Well, it’s not so much a legitimate supplier, as you might say,” he said slowly. “More like, ah...let’s call it a contact.” _

_ She peered at him narrowly. “You’re offering to sell me smuggled contraband?” _

_ He looked somewhat hurt. “I’m offerin’ you a  _ gift  _ of smuggled contraband.” _

_ Her eyes narrowed at the corners in a grin. “You have...a very interesting idea of trying to butter a woman up, Mr. Massani.” _

_ He felt, to his horror, a blush creep up the sides of his neck. “Just tryin’ to be helpful,” he muttered hoarsely, and fled back to the cargo bay. _

*****

“Come on. Come on, goddamn you,” he growled, a low hoarse whine of desperation. The butt of his rifle slammed, again and again, into the alien coffins; each blow sent a spiderweb of cracks through the translucent material covering them.

Karin had not yet stirred. Unconscious? Or dead? There was a line of mottling around her throat, and a sharp dark bruise over one eye-- the right eye, mirroring his own scarred half-blindness. 

“What did they do to you?” he muttered, another blow with the rifle punctuating each word. “Goddamn-- bloody-- bastard--  _ bugs-- _ ”

On the last word, the glass finally shattered. Sharp pinpricks pelted him as it exploded in all directions, but he didn’t care, didn’t even seem to notice. There was a low hum from inside the coffin, the sound of that same dreadful machinery that had consumed the colonist…

“Come on…” he murmured-- and those who knew him would have been surprised at the softness of the sound. He reached inside the coffin, slipped his arm around her waist, drew her to him. Her weight flopped bonelessly against his armor, her head settling against his shoulder. “I’ve got you now…”

He hated to set her down in the muck that covered the floor, but he rested her carefully against a wall, let her settle out of his arms as carefully as he could. As he released her, she stirred slightly, coughed, started awake with a sudden jerk. He reached out to grasp her shoulders, to steady her.

“There-- ‘s all right now,” he muttered gruffly, hoping his eyes didn’t show the surge of relief that had almost stopped his heart. “Breathe.”

Those grey-green eyes lifted to his, searched his expression, fear and desperation slowly giving way to that calm placid warmth he knew so well. “I knew you all would come for us,” she said softly. She reached out and put a hand on his arm. “Are you-- is everyone all right? Any injuries?”

“Survivin’ so far,” he grunted, shaking his head slightly, but his eyes never left her, holding her in his gaze like a beacon in the dark. It struck him with sudden overwhelming clarity that he had come here with the assumption that he might die...and that all of a sudden he didn’t want that to happen. “And we mean to keep doing it, too,” he added roughly. “You just sit still. You’ve been dragged halfway to hell; don’t worry about being a goddamn doctor, right now.”

She seemed about to protest-- but in the end she could not deny her own injuries, and sank back against the wall. Perhaps he was imagining it...but he thought she was watching him as intently as he was watching her, a symbol of life in this hellish place.

After a little while she spoke, a slight smile touching her lips. “I think I may take you up on that brandy shipment after all. I could use about six bottles.”

His eyes glinted and, astonishingly enough, he heard himself laugh. “On the house,” he muttered, and took her hand and squeezed it.


End file.
